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Fear, hope, comedy and despair all collide in Kevin Martin Murphy’s sharply written and powerfully acted one-man show about a radio host keeping the candle burning for humanity after the end of the world.Summary
Rating
Good
On entering The Space I was greeted with a familiar scene from my student radio days: the disorganised clutter of a radio station. When the lights went down a single performer entered and began both the play and his radio show with an opening monologue full of flair and based on the iconic scene from Good Morning Vietnam.
This is no normal fast-talking, drivetime DJ as this show takes place in the days after the bombs have dropped and the world has ended. This survivor is possibly the last person in the world, speaking to fill quite literal dead air.
The deftness with which writer and performer Kevin Martin Murphy’s script moves between humour and pathos is the greatest strength of the show; personal enough that the fragments of story could be about my own life, but general enough to move anyone who sees this show.
There’s a subtle flow between gallows humour in the face of the apocalypse and articulation of the beautiful minutiae of life that the host did not value in the before times and has lost now, told through the medium of radio chat. It reminded me of the seminal horror/comedy podcast Welcome to Night Vale.
End of the World FM charts the solitary life of its nameless radio host protagonist as he lays his humanity bare before the mic, in the hope that someone out there is listening.
The one-man show consists of a series of monologues, some to the mic and some directly to the audience. Murphy delivers a gripping full body performance, taking us inside the breakdown of this isolated DJ. The script moves between hilarious absurdity (Mary the Contrary Canary) to deeply moving (a monologue on all the regrets of the life he did not lead).
Through the prism of the last radio show – maybe even the last piece of human culture – Murphy riffs on fame, art, capitalism, the attention economy, parasocial relationships, new media and legacy media, all of which his character presumably dominates as the last person with a voice.
The show is structured around the passing of years in isolation, as the host continues his show, and follows his descent into madness. It would benefit from a stronger narrative linking the events together. There is a sense of character progression and time passing, but this does not draw the show together into a complete story. The final moments however do deliver a powerful end note.
The post-apocalypse world presented is sketched in broad strokes, which allows the show to focus on character. We get the sense of the DJ as a human – his love, grief, fear and hope – but we lack specifics. He remains an everyman, standing in for all of humanity at the end of time.
Murphy delivers a strong performance and a very sharp script in a show that uses a familiar sci-fi set up as a jumping off point to say something profound about our fears for the future and the common humanity, hopes, and regrets that we all share. Murphy is a talent to watch, and I am excited to see what he does next.
Written by: Kevin Martin Murphy
Directed by James Tudor Jones
End Of The World FM plays at The SPace until 29 July. Further information and tickets here. It then transfers to The Cockpit as part of Camden Fringe on 7 and 8 August, tickets available here.
